Author: Italian Roots Editorial Team

A complete, beginner-friendly guide to tracing Italian ancestry: start at home, find your ancestral comune, then use the free Portale Antenati and church records.

How to use the Portale Antenati, Italy’s free state-archive portal of civil registration records. Find your comune, browse images, and read Italian birth, marriage and death records.

A field-by-field guide to Italian civil registration: birth, marriage and death records, the Napoleonic and post-unification periods, and what each Stato Civile record reveals.

How to use Italian church records—parish baptism, marriage and burial registers—to trace your family before civil registration, sometimes back to the 1500s.

Can’t find your Italian records? You need the comune first. The best sources for finding your ancestral Italian town: naturalization papers, passenger manifests and vital records.

How to request birth, marriage and death records from an Italian comune by mail or email, what to write, and when you need certified, apostilled records for citizenship.

How to use FamilySearch, the free genealogy site, for Italian records: its digitized civil and church records, indexes, the catalog, and how it complements the Portale Antenati.

How Italian naming patterns work in genealogy: the traditional naming system that predicts grandparents’ names, patronymics, surname stability, and foundling surnames.

A practical guide to reading old Italian genealogy records: the key Italian and Latin words, standardized civil forms, handwriting tips, and how to decode births, marriages and deaths.